"Plot me no plots" - Citizen/Everyone Who Watched Game of Thrones

Citizen - "Plot me no plots."Act II, lines 268.

In my best Jerry Seinfeld voice (minus some racist slurs), "What's the deal with plot?!"
I found myself asking this as I first started reading The Knight of the Burning Pestle and was more than chuckled to see Francis Beaumont sum up his play-within-a-play midway through the second act. The line from Citizen is pretty straight forward in his desires that he wants the story told his way; that the idea of storyline and development had no baring on his entertainment. Bless my little wannabe literature scholar heart. Give me a solid limited series any day but please do not Atwood the fan service follow up. However, "plot me no plots" rings through time and is just the bold assertion of desire that so many of us play coy about to save some intellectual face.

The word "story" is something that has evolved over history. Pictographs, spoken epics, novels, theatrical performance, movies and the big one today: television shows. A joke uttered about a grandmother and "her stories" is evolving beyond the little old lady addicted to her tele-novellas; many people feel a sense of ownership over the stories they stan. Beaumont's Citizen (and Wife) are present in our time and it is likely that, as it happened in his time, many of today's audience members would not be in on the joke of who/what Citizen represents. With big blockbuster franchises and epic budget television shows dominating the current cultural experience it has become difficult for viewers to separate their personal story telling desires with that of plot and character development that culminates in a story's end.

Who isn't guilty of wanting their favorite character on the throne or for some backwater-Jakku-scavenging-staff wielding-girl to be "The Chosen One"? Personally, I am still mad that Disney axed the canon of the expanded universe novels after spending all my formative years planet hopping around the galaxy with the Solo Twins and their conflicted little brother Anakin. Troy Dennings and I need to have a heart to heart about his addition of "Star by Star" and what he did with MY Anakin and Tahiri.

Personal anecdote aside, everyone who consumes stories is guilty of Citizenship (Oh boy, you better bet I patted myself on the back for that one).  There is something innately human in being an opinionated audience member. However, this "ownership" (*cough* Citizenship) has also proven to be toxic. Shows such as Rick and Morty have produced a very divided viewership; the Edgelordian decree that "it's actually really deep", and the McDonald's counter jumping Schezwan sauce fanatics, and the rest of us who feel conflicted anytime they put on that Rick and Morty shirt they owned before yelling "I'm a pickle!" became en vogue. This all begs the question that is the joke of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, does audience participation ruin a story?

The answer is something that Beaumont's play fails to provide directly. The meta joke of being an audience who is judging the audience who's judging the play from within the play might have been too complex to gather so far removed from the amount of social leveling television has created with the help of the internet. Maybe this "bad" audience participation is perfectly okay. Nothing gets a room heated faster than saying you hate Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Stranger Things, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Friends, ER or Shakespeare.

If we justify Citizenship with the notion that "books belong to their readers" (Death of the Author and a million takes on the idea since, and including John Green) why is it that these fanatic story stans still feel so cringe-y when they interject? Could it be that we inherently understand that stories we do not write do not intricately belong to us and our whims? Possibly. I feel like it is a little more fundamental. "Shut up it's starting!!" sums the sentiment up. Keep your head-canon to yourself Citizen.